the moral reasoning of student athletes and athletic training students

ecame the Intercollegiate Conference on Faculty Representatives which later became the Big
Ten. The purpose of this meeting was to better identify the role of sport and faculty governance
on college campuses.
In 1905, because 18 students had been killed and 143 seriously wounded in football,
President Theodore Roosevelt met with representatives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to
challenge them to clean up football (Smith, 1988). In December of 1905, representatives of 30
different institutions met in New York, forming the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which in
1910 became the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Their original constitution had as its
very foundation the explicit purpose of developing character within these student athletes.
The next thirty years would see the introduction of more sports, the first glimpses of
national media attention, issues with the dangers of some sports, particularly football, and an
instigation of change in the motivation for athletes and their fans (Smith, 1988). In 1906 the
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was founded with a mission to provide,
“…Regulation and supervision of college athletics throughout the United States in order that the
athletic activities … may be maintained on an ethical plane in keeping with the dignity and high
purpose of education” (Hawes, 1999, 1900-1939 Article 1 ). Throughout the following decades,
collegiate athletics would find itself increasingly at odds with institutions of higher education. In
a report from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, the authors stated that,
“At their best, which is most of the time, intercollegiate athletics provide
millions of people—athletes, undergraduates, alumni and the general
public—with great pleasure, the spectacle of extraordinary effort and
physical grace, the excitement of an outcome in doubt, and a shared
unifying experience. Thousands of men and women in the United States
4